30% of Upper Management Will Retire In The Next 10 Years
By Charles Sipe | June 14, 2009
By now many are realizing the tremendous potential of Twitter as a marketing vehicle to communicate to a community that has given you their permission and attention. According to TechCrunch, Jason Calicanis just offered $250,000, just to be listed on the suggested Twitterers for 1 year, and thinks a spot on this prestigious list will be as valuable as a Superbowl spot within 5 years. Even Facebook wants to be like Twitter as demonstrated by their new profile page. Twitter has appeared to have made it mainstream with Twittering celebrities like britneyspears, the_real_shaq, aplusk (Ashton Kutcher), jimmyfallon, just to name a few. The network effect means that as Twitter continues to grow it will become more valuable to each user, and thus more valuable to marketers.
One of the major applications of Twitter is in market research. Imagine having a test group of millions, that can provide real time consumer feedback at a unprecedented level. Companies will be able to release a new product and almost instantly find out what people think. Additionally they can get take the pulse of customer sentiment and then make changes to increase customer satisfaction. Twitter could also empower customers to get their complaints heard as unhappy customers will have a way to tell thousands of followers about their bad experience. All it takes is a short text message that gets retweeted and a brand’s reputation can be tarnished overnight. This could mean a stronger focus on improving customer experience to prevent a fiasco ten times worse than Jeff Jarvis’ infamous Dell Hell blog post. Optimistically, companies will be able to better understand the customer by listening more closely and using the data mined from the Twitersphere to create improved products and services that will increase customer satisfaction.
Topics: Seattle Consulting | 3 Comments »
Case Study: Productivity Increased 30%
By Charles Sipe | June 9, 2009
In a presentation titled “The Internet’s Environmental Crisis”, Jason Calicanis argues that search engine optimization has polluted the internet and is ruining search.
“Search is an amazing technology and it has been incredible for all of us to be able to find what we want but these marketers have come in and said what is more important that what you want to find is what I want to interrupt you with. Anybody who has done any kind of search for anything important in their lives, a product, health, education will find that a majority of search results they look at are not excellent. They’re not even good or great anymore. The fact is the first 10 results should be great. There are 10 great sites out there for almost every result. You’re not getting to them anymore. These SEO slimebuckets…and I know that there are good SEO people…this whole concept of I have to rank higher than I deserve to has destroyed search. ”
While Jason does make an interesting argument, but I disagree that the “SEO slimebuckets” have destroyed search and that artificially improving a search ranking of a site is inherently wrong. Firstly, I don’t think search is ruined because it is still very effective 90% of the time at finding the information you are looking for. You do get bad sites every now and then, but Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving to punish the cheaters. I believe Google’s algorithm changed about 360 times in 2007. Google is based on legitimate links to your site, and you are unlikely to get legitimate links if you produce bad web pages. Therefore, SEO has improved search because it encourages people to write good informative content and regularly update their pages. Part of marketing is helping people who have a need to find you so that you can solve their need. So I don’t think it is wrong for a person with a service to put keywords in their site title, and in the first few sentences of their content so that they can be found more easily.
Topics: Seattle Consulting | 5 Comments »